


not a robot, but a ghost

by homsantoft (tofsla)



Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: 15 Days of FatT 2018, F/F, Post-Miracle Mirage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-18 06:46:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13676418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofsla/pseuds/homsantoft
Summary: We are not things that sleep, we strange drifting consciousnesses.Gray Gloaming, in love and beloved, still grows uneasy in the dark.





	not a robot, but a ghost

**Author's Note:**

> [Not A Robot, But A Ghost](https://open.spotify.com/track/19QFWj3ze8mKkjJ1LdsYYq?si=Cx-FHK0sT2yie1xuj6-NXg) is a hell of a Satellite/Primary song, tho the title is the bit that's most applicable to this fic in particular, so here we are. Thx bircheswatching for putting me in this hell.
> 
> 15 days of FatT day 2 - Sleep

Instead of lungs, the hiss-thud-click of mechanical ventilation systems—their constant hum. If a humanoid frame can be a body then so can a space station—so is a space station. The Brink is Gray Gloaming is the Brink—is the Satellite Observer of the Quire system—

The last time Gray slept, she slept very badly indeed. An unfamiliar bed in an observation room, transfer department. Too hard, the pillow too thin. Her hair felt scratchy against her face and her body was too warm and too cold at once, and she told herself—

Well—

At least you won’t have to do this again, right?

The Brink settles into its night cycle, an automated process not in the way that a muscle relaxes without conscious thought but in the way that means the shift can simply be observed, in every particular, without the need for intervention.

People walk the corridors—people nurse drinks in the bar—cargo hold doors slide open and tired workers punch in the codes that direct synthetic units to redistribute the contents. Near the spot which is a favourite exchange point for smugglers, Morning’s Observation is loitering, too scruffy a presence to set anyone on edge. The scanner Gray gave him won’t trip any of the alarms likely to be used in this system, and certain other kinds of signal she’s perfectly capable of locking down. She sends a brief query—negative response—only the crap weapons so far and nobody with RE implants—yeah—I’m on it, I’m on it—

But soon the activity of the station will sink into a quiet lull—never quite silent—subdued, all the same.

Demani, shuffling around the bathroom of their quarters now, will crawl into bed—and Gray will shunt a part of herself into a frame suited to joining her in that bed—will feel good. Will make Demani feel good, unravel the tension from her and replace it with a finer sort. Relieve that, too—eventually.

And then Demani will sleep, and Gray won’t.

We are not things that sleep, we strange drifting consciousnesses. The ghost of Gray Gloaming watches her lover preparing to rest—the Divine Belgard curls her waking mind around the body of ⸢Signet⸣, although ⸢Signet⸣ is half a system away from her—does Quire sleep?

Does it dream?

It cannot or will not tell us.

But we live. We live. Here: Gray Gloaming’s artificial skin is soft and yielding, dents under Demani’s clutching hand but does not bruise or break. Her mouth is cool, but she feels the heat of Demani’s inner thigh against it, sensors registering the shift in temperature, the growing dampness as she sweats. When she draws a bronze finger up the length of Demani’s slit, parts the folds of her, she feels the slickness. Perhaps it ought to feel like an academic exercise, but just as she felt her heartbeat stuttering when Demani spoke, in those early days, although she has no heart—just so—she feels that she would flush if she had blood. She aches to be touched, her whole body as present as a phantom limb. She had enough sex back then—the feeling stays with her— _an easy extrapolation_ , she could tell herself, but it’s more than that, more acutely felt.

Incongruous, maybe, to press a kiss just above Demani’s clit, and then another directly to it, no more than a gentle ghosting pressure as she slides two fingers into Demani—as she curls them sharply just _so_ many degrees, just _so_ deep, because it always makes Demani cry out—there, yes, Demani clutching at the synthetic strands of her hair, shuddering and bucking up against Gray’s mouth. _Please._

Gray Gloaming is in love. Where does the process live? Not in hormones, certainly—not in neural connections in the ordinary sense—but it’s real, it’s real. Oh, it’s real. 

Demani gasps short and sharp, again, again—Gray grinds her thumb against Demani’s clit now, kisses Demani’s hip, the curve of her stomach just below the navel, the sharp edge of her ribs where they’re made visible as Demani’s stomach muscles flex, as she pants, breathing more harshly every time. That perfect wavering quality to her cries. How beautiful she is. One hand is clutching at Gray still, head, shoulder, neck. Her leg kicks, knocks against the rounded hip of Gray’s frame. When Gray kisses her breast her other hand flies to her mouth, and when Gray bites gently down on the nipple her cry is barely muffled all the same.

There’s such a delight in how loud Demani can be—such a pleasure in the thing itself, in Demani’s desperate need for her. 

“Don’t try to be quiet,” Gray murmurs against Demani’s skin. “Who cares? It’s just us, right?”

“Oh,” Demani says. Her eyes are closed, Gray sees—eyelids trembling. Lips trembling—slightly parted. “Oh, Gray—”

Perfectly composed Demani. She’s beautiful in her armour, her braids arranged precisely and her makeup sharp, her clothes immaculate. Not less beautiful than she is right now, for all it’s more studied—but a different beauty. A beauty for the world to admire, but not to touch.

This beauty is only for Gray these days.

She murmurs quiet words against Demani’s skin. Coaxes her higher and higher in tumbling waves, a rising tide, until Demani’s back is arched off the bed and her hands are clutching at the shoulders of Gray’s frame—

Gray watches from outside of that frame, and from inside it. She feels the spasm of Demani’s body as Demani begins to come, feels how hard Demani is breathing against her—sees, from above, how Demani holds the frame to her, hand pressing Gray’s cheek to her breast—sees the desperate shift of her every expression, the fine details of every jolt of pleasure. 

Gray doesn’t stop fucking her—not until her more remote self registers the first hint of that shift, the place where too much becomes uncomfortable rather than exhilarating. Pulls out of her, then, at last—strokes her flank with gentle fingers, quieting—she might tremble if not for stabilisers in every part of the frame—

How strange that only watching Demani’s orgasm could bring her so close to the sensation of coming herself. She can—she has learnt that she is capable—she has no frame built for it but she has mapped out ways, ways to adjust connections, ways to narrow her expansive field of perception until she can make it happen. Ways a little too complex for this kind of night. It feels good anyway. Just this—

Well, no _just,_ not really. This. This is as much the thing itself as that—

A long slow kiss. Demani’s hands cup her face, and she settles into it—for an experimental moment limits herself to just this room. No expanse of mirage, no voices in the bar. Only this, for thirty-four seconds. 

But yes: Demani sleeps, finally—turned half onto her front, arm stretched out towards Gray’s frame. 

The station is at its quietest. Reach further and there’s a whole system, each planet a dream of itself, Volition the relentlessly literal centre of gravity, aggressive in its materiality. Anxiety in the view—anxiety in the quiet station—in the dark bedroom. Gray keeps herself loaded into the frame with Demani breathing deep and even beside her—

We are not things that sleep. 

There was another Satellite here once and she knows now—knows what they chose to do, to lock themself down into a silence that may prove to be permanent. They were older than her—but not old—she doesn’t understand—

She does. 

The thing they did was not go to sleep. But perhaps the exhaustion that they felt, the weight of failure, all the wasted hours and years and no chance to sleep any of it off—perhaps sleep wouldn’t have been enough, by then. They needed something deeper and so they created a dark silence for themself—

Yes. Fine. She understands and the understanding, utterly free of any identification with the need, shakes her. She can think of nothing worse than the dark—the dark—

“Gray,” Demani murmurs, and her voice is rough, half-asleep. “Are you still in there?”

A strange note of worry, Gray thinks, and wonders why, and then realises—she’s forgotten to make the frame move and shift in those minute ways that make organics feel at ease around her, left Demani in bed with an unnerving statue, lying on its back in utter stillness like a model of a dead woman. 

She snaps back into it, turns. Reaches for Demani in the dark. 

“I’m here.”

“Are you alright?”

Gray sighs—easy to make the body do it, a sort of mental muscle memory. 

“I was thinking about the other Satellite. It’s—I don’t like to. Not now. I know I’ll live a long time, if nothing happens to me, and I know—“

She stops the words—bites them off sharply. 

“It’s lonely at night,” she says instead. “In the dark—“

A night-light flickers on. Demani’s face is deeply shadowed, her body a silhouette. The room softens into shades of brown in the orange glow. 

“Like this, maybe?” Demani murmurs, and it’s such a ridiculous gesture, addressing such a small fraction of the problem, that it should be meaningless. 

Instead, Gray thinks she might cry if she could. 

What a human feeling. What a human impulse for comfort. And she is—after all, after all, she is—still human. 

She breathes—she, the station, ventilation chutes and valves. She, the humanoid frame in the bed beside her fiancée. She, the person. Even the ghost of a person is a person—in love—at war—and a little afraid of the dark.


End file.
